Ready for You (Ready #3)(40)

“Mia?” he said at the last moment.

“Yeah?”

“Thanks. I didn’t know who else to call. I needed…I don’t know. I just needed you.”

I closed my eyes as I tried to steady my breath and erratic heartbeat. He was hurt and grieving.

Don’t take the things he says to heart, Mia. Just be the friend he needs you to be.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said before clicking End with a shaky hand.

~Garrett~

This wasn’t real.

At any minute, I was going to wake from this hell I’d been living in for the past few days, and everything would be back to normal. My family would be happy again, my mother would stop crying, and I wouldn’t feel like there was this gaping hole in my heart anymore.

But I still kept waking up to find myself in this same f**king nightmare.

My dad was dead.

He’d been taken by a massive stroke at the age of fifty-eight.

It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t right.

There was still too much for him to do, too much for him to see and experience. God needed to give him back.

“Goddamn it! Give him back!” I yelled, flinging the half-empty tequila bottle at my bedroom wall.

It exploded upon impact, shards of glass falling to the floor as amber liquid trickled down the bare white walls. The rising sun was just starting to cast its rays across the room as it ushered forth a new day—a reminder of something else my dad would miss. It was my first night back in my own bed since Logan had answered that phone call and all of our lives had changed.

We ran out of the house, hastily strapped the kids in the car, and rushed to the hospital. As we entered the ER, Logan disappeared, immediately switching into doctor mode to get more information. My father had been brought in unconscious but breathing, but my mother hadn’t known much else. Clare and I found her huddled in the corner of the waiting room, clutching her handkerchief with wrinkled white knuckles.

“Mom,” Clare called.

She looked up, and her eyes found us. They were red, and tears stained her cheeks. She jumped up and pulled us into her arms, and the sobs grew louder.

“We did everything we were supposed to do,” she cried, referring to his last stroke that had put him into early retirement. “Everything the doctors told us to do after the last stroke, we did. Why did this happen? I don’t understand. He was fine this morning. Then, he got a headache, and now…”

I didn’t know what to say, so I held her. For as long as she needed, I held her.

Logan came out about an hour after arriving at the hospital and explained the stroke was fatal, and it was just a matter of time. His brain was hemorrhaging, and there was nothing that could be done. They’d given him morphine for the pain and kept him unconscious, but the rest would happen with time.

We were allowed to go in and see him one by one—to say good-bye.

I didn’t want to say good-bye.

Less than twenty-four hours later, he was gone.

I still didn’t want to say good-bye now.

The tequila bottle, now a beautiful mess of shards on the floor, sparkled under the sunlight, and the leftover alcohol bled down the wall, like tears.

“What the hell am I going to drink now?” I asked myself out loud, looking around the messy bedroom for something else to numb the endless stream of thoughts running through my head.

“I think you’ve had enough to drink,” I heard someone answer back.

How much did I drink last night?

My head lolled to the side, and through the blur, I made out Mia standing in the doorway.

“How did you get in here?” I slurred.

“You left your door unlocked, genius.”

“Did that on purpose,” I said with more slurring.

She looked around and noticed the glass. She sighed and disappeared into the kitchen. She returned with a trash bag and made quick work of the mess. She obviously didn’t appreciate the brilliant spectacle the sun was doing with the tiny glass fragments as much as I did. She also wasn’t drunk, so there was that.

I silently watched her as she meticulously picked up each piece, vacuumed, and cleaned the wall. She vanished into the kitchen again and came back moments later with clean hands and an expectant expression.

“What?” I asked.

“Get up,” she said.

“Why?” My head slumped back on my pillow, and I made no move to get up from my position on the bed.

“You’re not showing up to your dad’s funeral looking like that!” she exclaimed.

I looked up at her, and she was trying hard to be nice, but I could see she was annoyed. She probably hadn’t expected this when she said she’d help me.

“I’m not going, so you can just go if you want,” I said before slumping back down on the sheets.

“You’re not going?”

“Nope.”

After a few minutes of silence, I figured she had gotten sick of my behavior, and she’d left to save herself one more second of having to be around me. But as I glanced up, I found her standing in the exact same spot with her arms folded over her chest in that familiar pose she liked to take with me.

“Get up, Garrett,” she commanded.

“No.”

She took several steps forward until she was standing at the edge of the bed, hovering over me. The citrusy smell of her lotion invaded my senses.